


When I dream of falling, why do I remain asleep?

by TheDaysOfGold



Category: Psycho-Pass
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, Talking About the Past
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-30
Updated: 2020-10-30
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:47:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27278227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheDaysOfGold/pseuds/TheDaysOfGold
Summary: It's the anniversary of Kogami's demotion, and Ginoza does what he's always done. Cigarettes, a secluded spot in the underground carpark, and the tightening spiral of his own thoughts. But when Aoyanagi pays him a visit, down there in the darkness, an argument is set on the boil, and she delivers some harsh warnings, all of which sound to Ginoza as premonitions to come true.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 12





	When I dream of falling, why do I remain asleep?

Ginoza smokes exceedingly rarely. In fact, as he sits pondering the clinical madness of the world they find themselves in (dangerous thoughts under the eyes of Sibyl), he remembers the last time he drew the sickly, silky smoke of a cigarette. It was the day Kogami had been demoted.

The Day of the Fall.

He’s in the carpark below the CID, all 42 floors of the crushing weight of the building overhead, but it remains standing. Because it will always remain standing. He's sitting in one of the broom cupboards at the back, lest the smoke set off one of the building’s detectors and notify Sibyl of the nasty habit, one common only amongst those it didn’t agree with. The Sibyl System never did like addictive habits, after all. But Ginoza knows from experience that this place has enough ventilation to siphon out the sweet, sweet smoke before it reaches the detection of their governor. He’s sitting in the dark, which is an apt metaphor for something, but he doesn’t have the care to consider it, spending his time watching the smoke trail from his fingertips in a pale stream instead. Such an elegant thing, sitting here in the dark, mind a thousand years away. Well, not a thousand. Just three. Just three years since the demotion.

The light comes on, a thin streak of aggressively artificial white streaming through the slit in the doorway, painting him in a vertical stripe. Aoyanagi stands there, holding a lighter in her hand and a cigarette between her teeth, and though Ginoza should wipe the sharp look from his eyes at the sight of a friend, he can’t help but think that this intrusion is rude. As if this were a private place between him and his thoughts, thoughts that he doesn’t even let the Sibyl System read. The thoughts that even an old lover shouldn’t be privy too.

But she’s still on his side in this fight, even if their ability to ignore the past that they both secretly long for is like a cold that just won't fade, so he softens the look and glances away. She must watch him for a moment more, him poised upon the crates in the storage room like a cat trying to ignore the interruption, because she doesn’t speak for the longest time. And when she does make a sound, it’s a sigh. 

“Guess this is your escape too, hey Gino?”

“I was just leaving, Inspector Aoyanagi.”

“Relax,” she says, and places a hand on his shoulder before he’s able to snuff out his cigarette and depart. And Ginoza pauses, because he can feel the firmness of her hand, a firmness he remembers from very different activities, and he understands the message of it.

_Stay put._

“Akane asked me where you were, given you haven’t answered your calls for a couple of hours, not since your meeting with the therapist this morning,” she continues, settling in beside him on the crate. She sits nearer the light, but Ginoza has no qualms about it, because at least this way he can conceal his expressions. “She gets worried when you’re not on beck-and-call, it seems.”

“I assume you spun a lie?”

“No need to be so prickly. I know you don’t like liars, so I told her a convenient truth. I said you were conversing with some important individuals, and that you’d be uncontactable until the later part of the day.”

Ginoza moves his face into the light, a frown on his brow.

“Well, given how much your thoughts plague you Gino, I figured they could be considered an _important individual._ And anyway, Akane doesn’t need to know any more.”

“She’s probably already realised,” he mutters in reply, reaching for the cigarette again and filling the small space with smoke. “She’s clever like that.”

There’s a long pause following this, where they just sit in the slipstream of smoke. The mingling of brands that seem to complement one another, like spicy food and cold beer. Gino waits for the question, because he knows it’s coming, but after the extended pause, he realises that Aoyanagi wants him to answer it before it is asked.

With a sigh, he obliges. “It was up seven points,” he mutters, taking another drag to try and deal with that confession.

“Seven points?” She asks, and tries her best to sound calm, tries her best to sound surprised too. Evidently, she is neither. “You schedule your appointments at the same time every week, Gino, always have done. You’ve got chronic on-schedule-ness, and yet, every time you go to that man, you Psycho Pass seems to suffer. Seven points, isn’t that approaching the legal threshold?”

“I told him to keep it quiet for a while,”

“And what’d he say to that?”

Another pause, and another long drag of the cigarette. Nearing the end. “He said I should talk to my father.”

Aoyanagi chuckles, that sweet laugh he’d come to love in a previous life, but it dies away pretty swiftly. Laughter always does under the watch of the Sibyl System. “Did you tell him why you couldn’t?”

“I kept it brief. The man doesn’t need to know _every_ detail of my life history. If he did, he’d start thinking that everyone I get close to turns down dark paths.”

“You're right,” she mutters back, because she’s never one to beat around the proverbial bush. “Your father turns latent criminal when you're young, your partner while you two are in your prime, and it’s ironic, given today is-”

“Yes, I get it.” Ginoza cuts in, and he starts to regret his position this far into the room, given she’s sitting in the doorway and he’s unable to escape without her consent. “I know what day it is.”

“It is the anniversary of Kogami’s demotion.” She answers, clearly knowing that Ginoza does not need, or want, reminding. “Today, even Kagari is smart enough to keep his mouth shut.”

They sit there in silence for a while longer, filling the room with smoke from their cigarettes and warmth from their bodies, and Ginoza does all he can to avoid falling into that temptation once more. “Why are you even down here?” He asks finally, trying not to sound as sharp as he evidently does.

“Because the scanners will spot me if I smoke on the balcony.” She answers, equally as sharp, but with a condescending edge that Ginoza can’t quite stomach amongst the smoke, now more sickly than sweet.

“Why are you down here, knowing that _I’d_ be down here?” He tries again.

“Because you _are_ down here, my dear, and despite our past, I'm still going to sit in misery down here and tear myself apart with you. We both remember that day on the Abolition Block. We all remember the Specimen Case, and we all remember being unable to stop that idiot Kogami from going after Sasayama. We both feel the guilt of letting him walk into that, and everything that came after.”

“I ordered Kogami to stand down.” Ginoza answers sternly, even though he doesn’t feel it. He reaches for another drag of his cigarette, and mercifully, he’s almost at the end. Almost has a reason to leave. “I told him to stand down, and he did not obey me.”

“My dear, he did outrank you at the time.”

“Don’t call me that.” Ginoza snaps in return, snuffing out his cigarette with the sole of a perfectly polished shoe and moving towards the exit.

And though a foolish part of him expects Aoyanagi to reach out, to take hold of his arm or his shoulder, to urge him to stay and talk a little longer, she’s never been the sort of woman to reach out. Never one to put herself out for someone else. And for Ginoza, the sort that would go to the ends of the earth to see those few that he loves home and safe, he can’t really understand her point of view. Where he was a dog, loyal to the system and loyal, above all, to his brief list of comrades, she was the same creature, but twisted and cold. Where he was the loyal dog, she had always been the lone wolf.

But that didn’t mean he was banned from having the last word. Standing in the disgustingly bright light of the carpark, beneath the fluorescents that would be better suited to guide ships at night than weary detectives after another hard day’s work, he turns back and all the details of his suit and his hair and his storm-cloud eyes are on display to her. And then he speaks.

“Kogami was my problem that day, and he’s my problem now.” The words are clear, of course, and though the untrained ear would hear the characteristic monotone that their First Inspector is known for, Aoyanagi knows better, and she can hear the edge to his warning. “I know you have no faith in my ability to succeed in this job, but I will not make the same error as I did that day.”

“I’m not sure you could avoid it, darling. You can’t stop Akane when she wants to do something. After all, you're not happy with the memory scoop she’s doing this afternoon, are you?”

Ginoza stiffens. “How did you know about that-”

“Gino, darling, how could I not work it out? I'm a detective,” she says, with a roll of the eyes. “Akane infiltrated that site, and the rumour is that she saw Makashima’s face before her friend was killed. But there’s no record of it on the CID system, which means she was the only one to see it. If she’s as determined as I know she is, a memory scoop will be the only way she can get that image. And she’s got the guts to do it too. But you lack the guts to stop her.”

Ginoza looks away. He wants nothing more than to walk away, but feels some undeniable urge to explain his fears to her. His fear that he’ll corrupt her just by association, just like he corrupted his father and his friend.

“You can’t control her, Gino.” Aoyanagi stresses, and it’s clear that _this_ is the reason she came down. “You think you can, you feel like you should, just like you tried to control me, to make everything in your life perfect. But that’s not how other people work. And while you're busy trying to control everything, the world will just grow more and more chaotic in spite of you.”

“Awfully contrite coming from the woman who cut me off just so she could regain control of herself. The Specimen Case wasn’t easy for any of us, but you could have talked to me. You didn’t need to just walk away and leave me wondering.”

If this was aimed at an emotional weak point, then it’s clear that Aoyanagi has reinforced all of those weaknesses. Instead of answering him, she returns to her case-and-point. “You can’t control Akane, and you can’t protect her from all the dangers out there. It’s clear that you couldn’t stop Kogami, and you can’t stop her. She’ll meet the same fate.”

He leans back into the broom cupboard, back into the darkness and the smoke, to meet her eyes. “Fools learn from their own experience.”

“But have you learnt, my dear?”

He leaves this question without an answer, or rather, he leaves it without a verbal reply, because the look on his face screams all of the certainty, and all of the doubt. It really was an unpleasant mix, like throwing into the pot all the spices in the cabinet, and all the sweets too.

“You tell me that you feel bad for the way the Specimen Case ended, but when I look at you, the truth is clear.” He says finally. “You lay all the blame at my door, not because Kogami was on my team, but because he was my friend, and I should have tried harder to tame him. To reach out to him. And maybe you blame me for what happened to him the other day, being half-killed by Makashima in that underground slaughterhouse. But Kogami is a wild hunting dog, always was. I shouldn’t be blamed for that.”

She chuckles at this, taking another sip of smoke, and Ginoza couldn’t think of a more insulting reply if he wanted to. Regardless of their composure in the office, they really did hate one another on a fundamental level.

“And anyway,” he continues, forcing his voice to remain calm just in spite of her, not that it’s likely to go over as anything but fake. “Inspectors have a shelf-life, and we all know that Kogami’s was going to be short after witnessing what that killer had done to Sasayama.”

“Yeah?” She asks in reply, snuffing out her cigarette and meeting him in the doorway. She wedges herself between him and the frame, pressed up in the tiny gap just to get into his personal space. “And how long do you think your shelf-life is?”

“Know your place, Inspector.” Ginoza snaps back, stepping out of the doorway, as if physical distance will amount to some sort of protection against her undeniable truths. “This is a professional setting. We do not speak to one another like that.”

“And I wonder, my dear,” she says, continuing the previous thought without regard for his warning. “What would be so horrifying as to push the stoic Inspector Ginoza over the edge? What tragedy would befall our well-trained dog to snap completely, to go mad and be tossed away by the System that he has served for so long.”

She approaches him, standing beside him on the tarmac of the underground carpark, and looks into those storm-cloud eyes, for what seems like the thousandth time. “We all have something out there that is going to break us, Gino darling. Ko had Sasayama to break him. Your old man had demotion and shame to break him. Kagari had his angry childhood and violent father, and Kunizuka had that rebel band she fell in love with. I don’t know what mine will be, and I don’t know what yours will be either, but I do to wonder what’s going to break you, and how soon it’ll come.”

And then she leaves him to stew, as if merely mentioning the tragedy to come would somehow bring it into fruition. And if her words weren’t enough to summon fate into existence, then the paranoia they sparked in Ginoza was probably equal in destructive measure.

**Author's Note:**

> Hello all,
> 
> I've neglected you for too long. For this, I have no excuses. Too many books to write, and manuscripts to edit, but that's no excuse either.
> 
> I've been toying around with something that a commentor mentioned to me, namely, the day that Kogami was demoted, following the Specimen Case. I really like the idea, but it's going to need a little more work. Consider this one as a prelude to that. It was inspired by a fanart piece I saw a while back.
> 
> If you want something to tide you over, check out my books. In return, I vow to be more attentive here, and upload more often.
> 
> See you in the next one!


End file.
